The Mill River regularly hosts loads of Common Mergansers, but every once in a while I'll spot a pair
of Hooded Mergansers on the water. The Common variety have gotten used to me photographing them, but
Hooded Mergansers are a lot more skittish. Usually I can get only one or two shots before they take
off, fleeing the obnoxious paparazzo. This week, though, I managed to photograph a Hooded couple at length in the Mill Pond above the
Brassworks dam. Click the picture above for more photos.
For reference, here's what female and male Common Mergansers look like:
Oh boy, another bumper crop of sidewalk art: 26 entries in the 13th annual Chalk Art Festival in Northampton. (Dodging rain by being
postponed a month, the 13th festival found perfect weather for outdoor art on a Friday the 13th!)
Click the picture above to see the artists at work and their final creations.
Ah, it wouldn't be summertime in Haydenville without Merganser ducklings in the Mill River! Click the picture above for more, including pictures of the July 10 flood.
Perfect weather for Tuesday's pre-dawn eclipse: crystal-clear, cold crisp air. The moon was close to the horizon during totality (and it set before totality ended), but the air was so clean that the low angle didn't dim viewing at all. Click the picture above for more shots, taken from up the hill at Valley View Farm.
By the way, from Alaska and parts of Asia, the moon occulted the planet Uranus during the eclipse: see APOD photo. Here in Massachusetts, Uranus was pretty far from the eclipsed moon—the moon's position among the stars depends a surprising amount on where you are on Earth.
This was the last total lunar eclipse until March, 2025.
Brace yourself! For the 12th annual Chalk Art Festival, the organizers got 26 artists busy weaving magic on the sidewalks of Northampton. Click the image above to see the screevers at work and their finished creations.
There are a LOT of photos in the collection; to see just the completed works, click here: Finished Art.
A couple of days ago I spotted what looked like an unusually large pigeon in the shadows across the river. Hmm... I checked with binoculars, and sure enough, it was a Green Heron. It's been seven years since I last saw one of these guys around here. Rain had recently turned the river from a bed of rocks into an actual body of water, and the heron was patiently waiting for little fishes to swim by. Click the picture above for photos from both 2015 and 2022.
I'm not sure how this species got named a "Green" Heron—its body is bluish gray and its neck anywhere from maroon to purple, but in a couple of the 2022 photos you can see just a bit of green grazing the top of its back. The color disappears when seen face-on, though.